The research groups semantics and verification of parallel systems was founded in 2019 and has benn led by Prof. Dr. Marie-Christine Jakobs until she moved to LMU Munich in April 2023.

Beginning in April 2023, the research group moves to LMU Munich.

Our Research Area

The goal of software verification is to check whether a program satisfies certain properties. Properties of interest are many-fold and range from the absence of runtime errors (division by zero, null pointer dereference, etc.) over termination to functional properties like a programs sorts the input list.

Software verification plays an important role for today’s society. Software systems are all around us. While a crash of our cellphone caused by a software error is annoying, a software error in safety-critical applications like automatic cruise control can be catastrophic.

To check properties of a program, we need to know the semantics of the program, i.e., a description of the possible executions of a program.

Our Research Interests

Our group mainly considers formal methods for verification of software, i.e., our approaches are built on mathematical foundations. Especially, we are interested in formal methods belonging to the classes of static program analysis or model checking. In addition, we apply formal methods to dynamic approaches like testing and runtime-monitoring. In our research we consider the verification of sequential and parallel systems. In our group, we perform foundational research as well as tool development. Currently, we are particularly interested in incremental verification (including functional equivalence checking), the combination of verification approaches and optimizations for runtime-monitoring. For details on our research, we refer to our research and publication pages.

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Past Teaching

We regularly offered integrated courses in the area of automatic software verification and verification of parallel systems. Additionally, at least once a year we offered a seminar looking into current topics from our research area.

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